Richard Zwicky posted Enquisite’s search engine referral stats covering November and early December at the Enquisite blog the other day. According to Enquisite, Google was responsible for 78.21% of site traffic generated from search results. Competitors Yahoo and MSN trail far behind driving 5.94% and 3.67% of search referral traffic respectively.

Enquisite’s November 2006 data shows:



Just to be clear on the point, Google is seen to drive 78.21% of search referral traffic with Yahoo, MSN and AOL showing in the single digits. Poor Ask is seen to drive less than 1%!

These numbers are generally in line with the experience and expectations of SEOs but they are very different from those shown in the November 2006 Nielsen / NetRatings Top Search Provider stats which give Google only 49.5% of the search market.

Table 1: Top 10 Search Providers for November 2006,
Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
                           Searches        YOY    Share of
Provider                      (000)     Growth    Searches

Google Search              3,097,838      31%      49.5%
Yahoo! Search              1,518,249      27%      24.3%
MSN/Windows Live Search      515,526     -12%       8.2%
AOL Search                   389,577    11.0%       6.2%
Ask.com Search               159,586      33%       2.6%
My Way Search                141,808       9%       2.3%
Dogpile.com Search            31,291      -1%         1%
EarthLink Search              29,884      -7%         0%
BellSouth Search              29,721      N/A       0.5%
Comcast Search                27,618      N/A       0.4%

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, December 2006

Enquisite places Google far and away ahead with nearly 80% of referrals while Nielsen/NetRatings says Google only captured about half the search market with 50% of all searches conducted using Google. To further complicate the difference, it appears Enquisite shows separated data for unique Google search features such as Images, News, Froogle, Translate and Blogsearch.

What causes such a discrepancy between the numbers? My first guess is that they are measuring different aspects of search engine usage. Nielsen/NetRatings is looking at human usage while Enquisite is measuring click traffic.

Nielsen/NetRatings is examining the number of searches conducted using search tools found domains like Google, Yahoo and MSN. They are looking at search engine usage, not at search driven traffic, using human reporting instead of log analysis.

Enquisite examines actual search driven traffic; users that came to a site directly from search results. Explaining how Enquisite gathers and analyses data, Richard said,

“Enquisite is looking purely at the search referral data from websites we’re monitoring for users. So the market share data reflects precisely what’s going on across our network, meaning there’s no extrapolation or analysis in the reporting. The network spans users in over 100 countries, and every major category of industry; so it’s also a broad market representation.

I suspect that our numbers are also different because we’re not showing referrals from anything other than search queries, which would throw the numbers off. This means that traffic which comes from links embedded in articles posted at sites, content network advertising, links in emails (such as Yahoo Mail), or anything else other than search isn’t being counted.”

Page-Zero founder Andrew Goodman weighed in with his thoughts on the November 2006 Enquisite data earlier today at Traffick.com.

In his post, Andrew noted a post Richard Skrenta made yesterday at his Skrentablog that independently produced similar numbers to Enquisite’s. Skrenta

“picked a basket of medium-to-large websites and looked at the inbound search traffic percentages using Hitwise. I included Topix in this mix, both because it’s a representative content site, and also because I could double-check the Hitwise numbers against our own server logs and 3rd party measurements from Google Analytics. As it turns out, the relative inbound referral ratios agreed between Hitwise, Google Analytics and our own server stats.”

Skrenta’s analysis suggests Google drives approximately 70% of referral traffic.

“I’m not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search industry have known for a long time.

The New York Times, for instance, gets nearly 6X as much traffic from Google as it does from Yahoo. Tripadvisor gets 8X as much traffic from Google vs. Yahoo. “

For search engine marketers, the properties Internet users visit is irrelevant. What is important to search marketers is how Internet users get to our clients’ websites. Google has an enormous lead over its rivals in virtually every sense of the game. The only similar period I can recall came between 2002 and 2004 when Google produced the search results displayed at Yahoo. Moving in to 2007, Google remains far and away the most important venue in search marketing.